John Burroughs (1837-1921) might have wished for more poetry in this biography by free-lance writer Renehan (The American Scholar, The Conservationist, etc.), but he couldn't have asked for a more inclusive or caring portrait. Renehan apparently worried the bones of Burroughs's voluminous journals, diaries, and correspondence for 12 years, and his thoroughness is quickly evident here. All stones are turned, starting with the strange family life the budding naturalist weathered as a youth (one episode finds his fanatically religious father filling the boy's Christmas stocking with frozen horse manure: Christmas was for penance, not frivolity), on through his various tenures as schoolteacher, gravedigger, bank auditor, grape grower, celery farmer, reformer, and lecturer; his sorry marriage to Ursula and his liaison with Clara Barrus; and his infatuations with Emerson and Whitman, and with men of wealth and power—Ford, Roosevelt, Carnegie, Edison. Threaded throughout is Burroughs's search, amidst penury and scant encouragement, for the writing style that would become his signature. Renehan's affection for Burroughs is manifest from the start, and there are moments when this sympathy drifts into idolatry. But the author doesn't gloss over Burroughs's nastier qualities—his belief in social Darwinism, his willingness to be used by notorious grandees, and his philanderings all come in for full scrutiny. More problematical is Renehan's artless recording of event after event for long stretches of the naturalist's life: Here, the prose takes on a woodenness that Burroughs wouldn't have enjoyed (``[Burroughs] would be reactive rather than proactive. He would let his future find him rather than he it''). But these low points are partially balanced by passages of real power, particularly those detailing Burroughs's final years. Renehan gives the old Burroughs-as-lovable-bewhiskered- funkster chestnut a decent burial, and, commendably, allows the man to emerge from the fog of his reputation—broad of stature but riddled naturally enough with foibles. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-930031-59-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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